Given the torrent of absolute crap that comes from Hollywood’s movie factories year after year, I’m always grateful and hopeful when a new Coen Brothers’ film emerges.

Well, probably the nicest thing I can say about this movie is that “it didn’t suck.” Not unlike another of the brothers’ works, The Big Lebowski, Inside Llewyn Davis has a storyline that snakes around but never really goes anywhere. It’s certainly not the cast’s fault — Oscar Isaac does a fine job portraying Davis as a talented but struggling pre-Dylan folk musician who simply can’t catch a break, due to either bad luck, timing, or choices. Justin Timberlake plays his friend Jim, another East Village folkie who performs with his wife Jean, who we learn early on is pregnant with what may be Davis’ child. As usual, John Goodman makes an appearance (this time as an aging, junkie jazz musician).

The music helps carry the movie (like another Coen Bros. flick, O Brother Where Art Thou), and there are a few laughs here and there, but with no sympathetic characters to root for, I don’t think Inside will be remembered as fondly as most of their other movies.

Let’s face it: it’s been a long, long time since RS was a great magazine, or even a good one. But every so often they excrete something like this that is so totally stupid it makes sane persons’ heads explode. Nick Gillespie over at Reason.com charts the steady and apparently-still-ongoing intellectual decline of Jann Wenner’s publication.

The Times’ editorial page argues that Catholic nuns’ officially “certifying” their objections to buying insurance plans which pay for birth control “does not rise to a substantial burden” in complying with the ACA. Well, let’s ask someone who actually understands the law about that.

Bob Swartz would like to see some from MIT. I can’t imagine anything worse than enduring the death of one’s own child. My own in-laws are members of that very sad club.

“I was better connected to people at MIT that almost anyone else, right? What happens in these instances where people don’t have these connections and this sort of level of determination? They get completely crushed.”